The Modern Europe Colloquium is a community of Yale faculty and graduate students interested in the study of modern European history. Convening monthly during the academic year, it invites eminent and emerging scholars in the field from outside of the university to present their research and host a discussion. We welcome faculty and advanced students from Yale and nearby universities from all disciplines to attend and participate. The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the European Studies Council of the MacMillan Center.
For the latest and most update event notifications and announcements, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter of the European Studies Council at the Yale MacMillan Center.
Upcoming Speakers
| speaker | date & presentation title | ||
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Carolyn J. Dean, Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French, Yale University Omnia El Shakry, Professor of History, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, April 08, 2024 | HQ, Rm 107 ”Witnessing Catastrophe in the Modern Middle East and Modern Europe: A Discussion” |
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Previous Speakers
| speaker | date & presentation title | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-2024 | |||
| Hannah Stamler, postgraduate research associate, Princeton University |
4:00 pm ET, April 01, 2024 | HQ, Rm 107 ”The Last Kid: French Childhood, Culture, and Media in the Shadow of Depopulation (1900–1940)” |
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| Minayo Nasiali, Associate Professor, University of California, Los Angeles |
4:00 pm ET, February 26, 2024 | HQ, Rm 107 ”Sea Traffic: Rebel Sailors and Arbitrage Across Empires in the Twentieth Century” |
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| Alice Goff, Professor, University of Chicago |
4:00 pm ET, February 5, 2024 | HQ, Rm 107 ”The God Behind the Marble: Loot and Liberation in Nineteenth Century Prussia” |
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| Nikolaus Graf Vitzthum, Ph.D student, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, November 13, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 “The Last Dance: The Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and The Final Attempt to Build Socialism in The Third World, 1974-1991” |
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| Megan Brown, Associate Professor, Swarthmore College |
4:00 pm ET, October 23, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 ”The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community” |
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| Tamara Chaplin, Associate Professor, Swarthmore College |
4:00 pm ET, October 9, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 ”Sappho on the Small Screen: Becoming Lesbian in Modern France” |
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| Larry Wolff, the Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University |
5:30 pm ET, September 12, 2023 | HQ, Rm 276 “Habsburg Aftermath 1919: From Versailles to the Vienna Opera” |
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| 2022-2023 | |||
| Alec Walker, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, April 10, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 dissertation chapter workshop: “German Keynesianism, European Crisis Management: Social Democracy and Political Economy, 1966-1974” |
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| Chelsea Shields, Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Irvine |
4:00 pm ET, March 27, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 |
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| Stefanos Geroulanos, Professor of History, New York University |
4:00 pm ET, February 27, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 The Empire and Terror of Human Origins: Two Concepts |
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| Charlie Troup, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, February 20, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 dissertation chapter workshop: “Roads and economic reason: the emergence of cost-benefit analysis in British governance, 1947-1964” |
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| Jennifer Allen, Associate Professor of History, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, February 13, 2023 | HQ, Rm 107 “Noah’s Ark for Future Generations” or Genetic Imperialism?: The Dilemma of the Seed Bank in Postwar German History |
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| Leora Auslander, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor, Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History, University of Chicago |
4:30pm ET, Tuesday, November 1, 2022 | HQ Rm 136 “Racial and Reproductive Regimes: Regulating, Providing, and Acquiring Donor Gametes in France and the United States, 1980s–2010s” Co-sponsored with the Department of French |
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| Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Oxford, and Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow, Humanities Council, Princeton University |
4:00 pm ET, Monday, October 24, 2022 | HQ, Rm 107 “Political Men: Masculinity and Politics in 20th Century Europe” |
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| Thomas Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley |
graduate student only workshop 4:00 pm ET, Monday, October 10, 2022 | HQ, Rm 107 “Why We Care for the Dead: The Work of the Dead Revisited” |
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| 2021-2022 | |||
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Camille Robcis, Professor of History and French, Columbia University |
4:00 ET, Thursday, April 21, 2022, “Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France” |
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| Lauren Stokes, Professor of History, Northwestern University |
4:00 ET, Thursday, April 7, 2022 | HQ, Rm 207 “ ‘Harlem in Germany’: Race, Migration and the American Analogy in the Federal Republic” |
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| Dirk Moses, Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, University of North Carolina |
4:00 pm ET, Thursday, March 10, 2022 | HQ, Rm 136 “The Problems of Genocide: Writing the History of a Concept” Co-Sponsored with the Global and International History Workshop |
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| Faith Hillis, Professor of Russian History, University of Chicago |
4:00 pm ET, Thursday, February 17, 2022 “Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom 1830s-1930s” |
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| Jessica Namakkal, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Comparative Studies, Duke University |
4:30 pm ET, Thursday, February 3, 2022 South Asian Studies Council Colloquium Series: Book Panel: “Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India” |
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| Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico |
4:00 pm ET, Thursday, November 18, 2021 |
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| Terence Renaud, Lecturer, Humanities Program and Department of History, Yale University |
4:00 pm ET, Thursday, October 14, 2021 In Person, Open to the Yale Community Only: Luce Hall, Rm 203, 34 Hillhouse Ave. All were welcome on zoom, link, please register: |
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| Dominique Kirchner Reill, Associate Professor of Modern European History, University of Miami |
4:00 pm ET, Thursday, October 7, 2021 “Can Social History Out-Story Charisma? The Fiume Crisis as Counter-Narrative” |
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| 2020-2021 | |||
| Zaib un Nisa Aziz, Yale Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History |
12:00 pm ET, Monday, April 19 Chapter Workshop: “Lenin’s Moment: Global Revolution and the Historical Case for Universal Self-Determination” with commentary from Professor Jennifer Allen (Yale University) |
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| Anna Duensing, Yale Ph.D. Candidate, Departments of History and African American Studies |
12:00 pm ET, Monday, April 5 Chapter Workshop: “‘Like a Smile Which Dies on the Lips’: Black Radical Exile and the Limits of Soviet Bloc Solidarity” with commentary from Dr. Terence Renaud (Yale University) |
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| Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan, Professor of History and Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights |
12:00 pm ET, Monday March 22 Discussion of an excerpt from The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020) with commentary from Orel Beilinson and Charlotte Kiechel (Yale University) |
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| Marta Kalabinski, Yale Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History |
12:00 pm ET, Monday, March 8 Chapter Workshop: “Weaving the Port into the Socialist City: Fluid Connections and Transgressive Movements in Gdansk and Gdynia” with commentary from Prof. Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) |
All meetings this semester on zoom. | |
| 2019-2020 | |||
| Kira Thurman, Assistant Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan |
4pm, February 24, 2020 Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms |
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| Alon Confino, Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies & Professor of History and Judaic Studies, UMASS Amherst |
4pm, February 3, 2020 What Would Palestine Look like? Zionists’ Imagination and the Nakba, 1948 (joint lecture with Judaic Studies) |
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| Peter Holquist, Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History; Graduate Studies Chair, University of Pennsylvania |
4pm, November 11, 2019 The Code of Land Warfare at the 1899 Hague Conference: Russia’s Role and the European Setting |
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| Tehila Sasson, Assistant Professor Department of History, Emory University |
4pm, September 30, 2019 The Myth of the Market: Humanitarianism, Capitalism and the End of Empire |
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| 2018-2019 | |||
| Andreas Killen, Professor, City College of New York |
12pm, September 26, 2018 The Prisoner’s Cinema: Interrogation and Indoctrination in the Age of Brain Exploration |
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| Leonard Smith, Frederick B. Artz Professor of History, Oberlin College and Conservatory |
4pm, November 27, 2018 ~ Problematizing the Nation-State: France at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 *co-sponsored with the Department of French |
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Paul Hanebrink, Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Federico Finchelstein, Professor, The New School Bruno Chaouat, Professor, the University of Minnesota Carolyn J. Dean, Charles J. Stille Professor of Hitsory and French, Yale University |
4pm, March 4, 2019 Populism Then and Now: A Symposium *co-sponsored with the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund |
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| Camille Robcis, Associate Professor of French and of History, Columbia University |
4pm, March 26, 2019 *co-sponsored with the Department of French |
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Carolyn J. Dean (Yale); Adam Stern (Yale); Cathy Caruth (Cornell); Thomas Keenan (Bard); Hannah Pollin-Galay (Tel Aviv); and Michael Roth (Wesleyan) Moderated by Samuel Moyn (Yale) |
5pm, April 22, 2019 The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide *co-sponsored with the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism |
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| 2017-2018 | |||
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Holly Case, Associate Professor of History, Brown University |
The Age of Questions in its Federative Aspect (with commentary by Sara Silverstein) |
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Claire Zalc, Director of the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, Paris |
Denaturalized? The History of Loss of Nationality under Vichy France (1940-1944) |
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Charlotte Kiechel, Yale University |
Raphael Lemkin and the First Global History of Genocide |
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Kathleen McCrudden, Yale University |
“The Dying of the Light: Sophie de Grouchy and the Afterlives of the Enlightenment” |
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Kate Brackney, Yale University |
At Modernity’s Horizon: the Emergence of Planet Auschwitz during the Cold War |
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Carolyn J. Dean, Charles J. Stille Professor of History & French, Yale University |
From the Survivor to the Activist: A History of Bearing Witness in the Twentieth Century |
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Sara Silverstein, Yale University |
Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe: The League of Nations, State Sovereignty, and Universal Health |
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Enzo Traverso, Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University |
Rethinking Left-Wing Melancholia |
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Quinn Slobodian, Associate Professor of History, Wellesley University |
Racial Science against the Welfare State: Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, Thilo Sarrazin |
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| 2016-2017 | |||
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Anna von der Goltz, Georgetown University |
The Other ‘68ers: Activism of the Center-right in West Germany’s Age of Campus Protest |
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| Dagmar Herzog, The Graduate Center, City University of New York | On Aggression: Psychoanalysis as Moral Politics in Post-Nazi Germany | ||
| Scott Spector, University of Michigan | Intoxications of the Blood: Sex, Murder, and the Self in Modern Central Europe |  |
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| Rita Chin, University of Michigan |
The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe |
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| 2014-2015 | |||
| Monica Black, University of Tennessee | Healer, Messiah, Rock Star: Bruno Gröning & Early West German History |  |
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| Kimberly Lowe, Lesley University | The League of Red Cross Societies and International Committee of the Red Cross: a re-evaluation of American influence in the interwar Red Cross movement |  |
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| Jeffry Diefendorf, University of New Hampshire | The Past is not a Foreign Country: Urban History as Engagement between Past and Present |  |
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| Padraic Kenney, Indiana University | The Prison has Become a Political Battlefield’: How World War I Transformed Political Imprisonment in Europe. |  |
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| Devin Pendas, Boston College | Law and Democracy: Transitional Justice in German Courts, 1945-1950 |  |
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| Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University | The Long War of Italian POWs, 1940-1950: What We Learn from Studying Defeat |  |
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| Stephen Kotkin, Princeton University | Stalin: Geopolitics, Ideas, Power |  |
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| Grey Anderson, Yale University | The French Army on Trial, 1961-1962 |  |
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| David Petruccelli, Yale University | Policing the Drug Trade in Interwar Europe |  |
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| Larry Wolff, New York University | The Singing Turk: Ottoman Themes in European Operatic Culture in the Long 19th Century |  |
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| Stephen Gross, New York University | Informal Empire in the Balkans, 1920’s-1930’s |  |
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| Marci Shore, Yale University | It Was My Choice: A Phenomenology of the Ukranian Revolution |  |
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| Jay Winter, Yale University | Photographing War: The Eye of the Amateur |  |
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